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Software · Education & science

Nelson

Extensible and Modern numerical computing environment.

  • Completely free
  • Windows, macOS and Linux
  • Open source

Overview

Nelson is a programming language, available on Windows, macOS and Linux.

Features described in its GitHub repository and on its official website: debugging.

Overview written by LicitPro from the documentation published by the authors and the cited sources; we have not tried the resource ourselves.

Excerpts that establish this information
  • “Nelson is a free, open-source array programming language for engineers and scientists.” — official website, 10 November 2026
  • “The command window, editor, debugger, variable editor, and figures all run in your browser, with nothing to install.” — official website, 10 November 2026

At a glance

Nelson is completely free: it is open source software, and every feature is available without paying or subscribing.

Its licence (LGPL-3.0+) is a copyleft open source licence: you may use, study, modify and redistribute it, including commercially; modified versions must keep the same licence.

Strengths

  • Open source code
  • Commercial use allowed

About

Nelson is a matrix and array programming language providing a powerful open computing environment for engineering and scientific applications using modern C/C++ libraries (Boost, Eigen, …) and others state of art numerical libraries. It has sophisticated data structures (including cell, struct, linear systems, …), an interpreter and a high level programming language. Nelson has been developed to be an open/modular system where an user can define these own data types and operations on these data types by using overload. Syntax is very similar to GNU Octave or MATLAB® so that most programs are easily portable.

Description from Flathub — AppStream (Flathub)

Sources and checks

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